from boing boing:

Over at MobHappy, Russell Buckley comments on a news story about an elderly gentlemen who for years has called his late wife's Verizon voicemail just to hear her voice. During a system change though, the message was lost. Apparently though, Verizon heard about the sad situation, found a back-up of the old greeting, and restored it.

The first few years after he died, I would call my father's old number every 2 or 3 months, letting it ring a few times before hanging up. The number had been reassigned to new people, who I liked to imagine wondered what the quarterly prank call from Boston was about. (This was circa 2004 or so, Cambridge days.) I never left a message, don't think I ever held the line long enough for anyone to pick it up. I can't say for sure what I thought I was doing. There was no ghostly recorded voice on the other end, and I harbored no supernatural fantasies about Dad himself answering. My father was a strict materialist and good with electronics, and I figure that he'd find a way call me directly should he find himself inhabiting the phone system.

The calls were likely just a matter of wanting to exercise a kind of muscle memory. A phantom muscle memory, maybe? There was an itch where my father had been that could be scratched (sort of) by tapping out the numbers.

The itch in the missing dad limb has been acting a bit recently. My sister is getting married this week, and I find myself having to stand in for my father at the ceremony, this by walking the bride in and handing her off. There are toasts to be made, and I worry just a bit about pulling it all off. My father was not only funnier than I am, he was funny in the family's native language. His favorite joke was actually wedding related. It concerned a legendary Haitian tafiateur - a connoisseur drunk, basically - who passes loud, toxic gas while walking his daughter up gleaming, crowded, white marble church steps to her nuptials. The stock tafiateur being marked by a certain kind of mock dignity, dude turns to his daughter and, in a loud, mock-formal, french-ish creole, says of the fart, "dites que ce moi;" say that it was me. I've always found that short, absurd little joke hilarious for no reason that I can put a finger on. (Because I was kid when I first heard it and it was about farts and selfish, imperfect adults?) But I'd love to tell that joke at my sister's wedding. My father would have known when and how to get that material into the program, but the only strategies I can think of are overly mournful and mourn-y. Self-interested. What a great event this is, I wish my father was here to see it, here being a wedding, and by the way: my father had this great wedding joke. I'm half the man he was, which is why that joke doesn't sound as funny when I tell it, but that's fine because that secondary lack brings us back rather nicely to the primary, paternal absence in the set-up. But best of luck to the happy couple, huh!

When Dad died, the most excellent shrink I was seeing at the time told me that now I'd have to "adjust to being fatherless in the world." I didn't really understand what the shrink meant at the time, but as I've worked my way through some recent life/work-type BS it occurs to me that the good doctor was warning me that no one had my back anymore. Don't get me wrong: I've got lots of friends and family I can impose on, but my father was tuned into to my particular, unique matrix of issues in a way no one else was. Because he was my father, that tuning in meant he tried to take responsibility for those issues in his own weird ways as well. When I was a struggling freelance writer he would show up unexpectedly at my apartment with bags groceries that for some reason always included dozens of tins of chicken Vienna sausages. (On sale, Dad?) The savings from buying in bulk often went into a check discretely, securely taped to something in the shopping bag. Once, after I drunk dialed him from a party to tell him I loved him (if you think this is bad, you need to get a load of my maudlin, sentimental drunk), he drove all the way in from Queens in the middle of the night to make sure I went to bed on my stomach instead of my back. He ended up drinking beers with me and my roommate until morning, regaling us with tales of his own epic binges back during his navy days. We fought a lot, right up to the end actually, but as long as my father was alive I knew the world had guard rails and bumpers on it, well-told jokes. Being fatherless in the world meant that there was no longer a plausible possibility of rescue. There would be no heavenly intervention during a time of need via Vienna sausage.

Of course some parents bring sausages and check, other's gold and accessories. My mother, perhaps sensing that I needed some help filling in for dad this weekend, decided I needed some of instruments and tools of the office. She dug some of Dad's old tie clips out, some of which had been given to my father by her father. It was a touching, weepy, bawl inducing moment until I got mad because my mother, while trying to impress upon me the value of the clips - real gold! real pearls! - couldn't help throwing in the admonition not to pawn them

"Pawn them? Pawn them? Who the hell pawns things anymore? Why the hell would you say such a thing? Is that what you think my life is like?" I was mad for about 20 minutes, but it was still good to have the blue box in my hand. I just wish I wore ties more, though.